French firing squad figures revealed

To the names of the 1,357,800 French soldiers killed by enemy action in the first world war historians now have to add 550 deaths by French firing squads.

The number executed for military offences, which has eluded researchers for more than 80 years because of a top-level cover-up, has been unearthed by army historians, led by General André Bach, who re-examined all the courts martial conducted between 1914 and 1918.

Government after government has refused to allow anybody to count the number of soldiers sentenced to death for offences ranging from desertion to drunkenness. But the mood changed with the 80th anniversary of the armistice last year, when the prime minister, Lionel Jospin, said the men should be honoured with the other war dead.

Until now, the most quoted figure was based on a 1934 investigation by Crapouillot magazine, which referred to 1,637 executions, but it is thought that this was based on the number condemned to death, and excluded those reprieved and returned to duty.

Unless the archives at Vincennes military fort in outer Paris are incomplete, the accounts of the French 1917 mutinies, vividly portrayed in Stanley Kubrick's film Paths of Glory, will have to be rewritten. Most executions took place between September 1914 and September 1915, before trench warfare was fully developed.

"Executions after the failed offensives of 1917 were comparatively few and there were none in the eleven months of 1918," one of Gen Bach's researchers said.

The exact number of men who died when Philippe Pétain suppressed the 1917 mutinies will be released later, but they could be low enough to revive the propagandists' view that he was a humane general.

"By 1917, officers began to understand the appalling suffering of their troops and reprieves became commonplace," the researcher said.